Kimberly Knutsen

The Lost Journals of Sylvia Plath is a book that explores and dissects family, life, love, and relationships. Each character is dealing with personal issues that they struggle with on a everyday basis.

Katie wants a fairy tale life she can’t have and is constantly feels depressed because she feels disappointed with the life she’s living. Her husband, Wilson is equally unhappy and also feels no love from his marriage. On top of that, he also wants to be respected as an academic as the only male in his Women and Gender Studies department and vows to prove them wrong with his dissertation titled “The Lost Journals of Sylvia Plath”.

Katie and Wilson constantly nitpick and nag at each other making their relationship unstable. Both are so miserable, are not honest with each other, nor do they seem to trust each other very much. I observed that while reading this novel that they seem to blame each other for their own problems as they try to avoid personal demons that are deeply rooted in their past and upbringing. In addition to all of this, they both have a pessimistic view on life.

Katie’s sister, January, who imposes herself on her sister’s family is very selfish and very self-centered. She was my least favorite character in the entire novel. She’s depressed, is energy draining, melodramatic at times, and brings a lot of her problems on herself. Instead of fixing her own problems, she wants others to do it for them.

The novel is a bit of a heavy book, just by looking at its title. It deals with chronic depression, alcoholism, among other issues. I personally thought it would be more of a dark comedy because of the title and synopsis, but it ended up being too heavy of a book for me personally.It’s moderately slow-paced and it is set up into multiple sections. I did like that the story character-driven and how the multiple point of views allow readers to really get inside of the characters heads and see their past and current lives.

Overall, I wished that there was more character development in the book. While some characters changed for the better or got a better grip on how to solve their issues and move on, many were stagnant and dove deeper into their depression. The story moved a bit too slowly at times for me and I had trouble staying with the story at times.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the author in exchange for a fair and honest review.… (meer)

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

To be clear, there's nothing particularly bad about Kimberly Knutsen's The Lost Journals of Sylvia Plath, and the reason I didn't care for it isn't because it's badly written -- titled off a clever premise that the rest of the book is hung off of (one of the main characters, a rare male professor of women's studies, has decided for his dissertation to "creatively recreate" the last two volumes of the real Sylvia Plath's personal diary, which were originally burned by her husband right after her death), this is a very typical MFA-type character-heavy domestic drama, with nothing really that unique about it but nothing really that terrible either. No, the main problem is simply one of length; at 400 densely packed pages (or over 500 under a traditional layout), and with almost nothing of importance actually happening to these characters in all that time, I just quite simply lost my patience for the book about halfway through, as will most people who don't have a very specific love for glacially paced academic tales. Not a bad book to check out, but buyer definitely beware.

Out of 10: 7.7… (meer)